In my SMP world I have large Buildcraft quarries operating and I wish to ensure that they keep on operating even when I'm not around. I know that I can use the Teleport Tether to keep chunks loaded, however I'm not sure how many chunks I need to keep loaded in order for my quarry to continue operating.

Do I need to keep all chunks containing the quarry loaded, or do I only need to keep the chunk containing the quarry block itself loaded? Also if I am piping items back from the quarry will anything bad happen if the chunks containing those items are not loaded?

2 Answers
2

You need to keep all chunks that are actively being quarried loaded or Bad Thingstm will happen. As for piping, nothing bad should happen if you don't keep all your piping loaded, however keep in mind that things won't move through unloaded pipes either so you won't get your materials till you go near the pipeline.

you just need to have the place loaded where the items get piped to :D
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RustyMembersSep 27 '12 at 12:50

1

I once forgot to put a world anchor on the room my quarry piped to. Everything fell out of the pipe at the point where it reached the unloaded segment. I came back to a game-lagging pile of thousands of cobble on the floor.
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Jonathan DrainOct 7 '12 at 19:39

Keeping chunks loaded is not cheap. This is a good way to get banned from a Tekkit server. :)
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SevenSidedDieOct 7 '12 at 19:31

There is a per-player limit on the number of chunks that can be kept loaded (default 81), because it sucks up server resources. Going over this limit by scattering anchors/tethers everywhere has two effects: 1) makes some of them randomly not work, defeating their purpose; 2) demonstrates to the admin that a player is a clueless resource hog that shouldn't be trusted to not build a machine that will crash the server.
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SevenSidedDieOct 7 '12 at 19:48